Apple released the Lion Recovery Update in October, 2011, and, after they updated the Lion recovery partition to 10.7.2, there was a great hint from Clay Caviness who dug into the update and highlighted the the relevant files and commands that it used to accomplish this update.

Recently, 10.7.3 came out, however, and the RecoveryHD partition is not updated if you use Software Update; it will stay at 10.7.2. This is probably not a big deal, as Apple didn’t deem it necessary to update, but for some users, this may not be good enough.

Note: Running the full 10.7.3 installer from the App Store will update the partition; this is fine for your home computer but not practical for large deployments.

Puts it all neatly into a self-contained disk image along with the script RecoveryHD Updater.command which can be used to easily create or update the RecoveryHD partition, even on the disk you are currently booted from; don’t worry dmtest takes care of all the logic to create or update.

The final disk image

Requirements:

Download the latest version of Install OS X Lion.app. Option-click the Purchases tab in the App Store and you will be able to “Install” (download) the latest version available

Otherwise just double-click it in the Finder and it will ask you for the files and paths which you can just drag into the Terminal window and press Enter (don’t worry about the trailing spaces it adds)

When you run the script in the disk image you will be prompted for an admin password and away it goes, with all sorts of ugly output because it never thought a human would gaze upon it’s hidden ways…

dmtest updating the RecoveryHD partition

Update: Just tested with 10.7.4 and this script still works correctly, nothing has changed in the structure of the updated Install OS X Lion.app from the App store, note that the 10.7.4 installer is version 1.0.21 (10.7.2=1.0.13 and 10.7.3=1.0.16)

Update: Script will work on 10.8 without modification, however I have updated the script anyway to be a bit quieter when mounting the various DMGs, to accept tilde paths, accept the RecoveryHDUpdater as either a DMG or PKG, and changed prompt phrasing to include Mountain Lion.

So I have installed Lion 10.7.3 from the Mac App Store on my iMac and assume that the RecoveryHD partition has also been updated. My question is, do I have to install Lion Recovery Update 1.0 now or is this update included in the 10.7.3 Mac App Store update?